Street View: Republican Frontrunner Trump Disliked

Donald Trump won the Massachusetts Republican primary easily a few weeks ago, but the billionaire’s political success wasn’t acknowledged by people who were interviewed recently in Kenmore Square.

The Republican frontrunner won Massachusetts on Super Tuesday, taking 22 delegates of the 42 available. Trump’s strength in the polls has been matched by the intensity of his rhetoric. In Kenmore Square, people of different ages and occupations held similar feelings that Trump’s statements were offensive. They also raised many of the same priorities: wealth equality, immigration, economy, education and health care.

“If he was the president, he would put us poor people into a big ship, and ship us off to a nowhere island,” said David A. Davis, 54, of Back Bay while sitting on the stone chair alone in the bus station with an army green jacket and faded jeans. “He feels he can say anything because he is a billionaire,” Davis said.

Davis, now unemployed, said he was previously in Chicago, one of the places where Trump built his Trump Tower, and that Trump did help the economy by the investment, but “that was all the rich’s thing.”

He added that most offensive statement by Trump was the Mexico border wall, which was so irrational to him. He said although he was born in America, his parents were all African-American immigrants.

“I would probably vote for Bernie Sanders,” Davis, who concerned most about equality, said, “because he would take from the rich to the poor.”

Sitting on the stone chair next to Davis, Kevin Dwier, 25, the marketing director of Lowell National Historical Park, said that based on his economic knowledge learned in college, everything Trump said about economic reform was wrong. He added that he might vote for Sanders because of Sanders’s reform of supporting small business.

Devon King, 22, enrolled in Boston Green Academy, said Trump’s comments on women were insulting. She said she would vote for Hillary Clinton because the former Secretary of State is a feminist who advocates for more funding on education.

Karen Garrett, 67, of Tewksbury, said she was a Republican, but she didn’t know who she would vote for yet.

A former nurse, Garrett was most concerned about health care. She criticized that the whole health care system for having too much red tape, but she didn’t see any candidate pay attention to that.

She said that she once went to one doctor for painkiller, but the first doctor transferred her to the second one. When she went to the second one, he still didn’t prescribe her medicine.

“It’s a disaster,” she said. “ It was so painful, but I couldn’t get the medicine.”

She added that if Trump started to focus on health care, she would vote for him although she disliked his manners.

Patrick Sigh, 22, an engineering student at Boston University, said that he could understand Trump’s ideology of foreign policy, especially of Mexico, but that Trump used a radical way to present himself and made too much extreme point of view to apply to the whole U.S. generation.

“I won’t vote for him, because I think it will cause chaos through U.S. and he appears to a extremist,” Sigh said, “even though he might have good ideas.”

Pat Phipps, 70, a homemaker from New Jersey, took off her sunglasses with widened eyes when asked what she thought about Donald Trump as a possible president.